With the meteoric rise and proliferation of technology and the web becoming part of everyday routine, small businesses need to be aware that their browseing habits can be tracked, and that unless you’re careful, other companies can track your data and habits, and using them for marketing purposes, or even more unsavoury purposes.

An example might be that during the course of a day you or your employees may search for a particular deal on an interstate flight. Then everytime you jump onto Facebook, or Google, you are bombarded with ads related to airlines or travel. This is called retargeting and has become big business for big business. They will spend millions on retargeting campaigns to identify users habits, and then use that data to market directly to them. There is nothing wrong with this sort of marketing, and it can be very effective, but it is an indication of how vulnerable your habit are online.

A situation that me not be so good is where you may have filled in a form with your address email and phone number. Again this is a normal process, but you need to be aware that your information may not only be available to the form recipient, but also bots that crawl the web looking for this kind of information. The information can then be used on mass for many purposes, but normally it is sold on, and you’ll find yourself on many email lists. This is not only annoying, but also a form of identify theft.

What to do about it?

One of the simplest ways to deal with this kind of breach is simply install a free piece of software called Ccleaner. You can download it here.

Once installed you cans run it at the end of each day to clear history, cookies, ans cache of your machine and browsers. It goes along way to keeping your machine private, but also will speed up your browsing and other activities.

To install the software, simply download, follow the install instructions and run the program. it couldn’t be simpler to use. There is a big button that say “Clean”. Just make sure your settings are as you want them.